Ashes of the Singularity PC Performance Review

4K Testing with AMD R9 Fury X and Nvidia GTX 980Ti

 

Moving to our 4K testing we see that AMD’s R9 Fury X and Nvidia’s GTX 980Ti continue to perform similarly at Low settings, with both GPUs actually performing worse with the DirectX 12 API. This changes when we move up the graphical settings, but it does show that DirectX 12 does not necessarily mean better performance in games.  

Moving to higher graphical settings we see that AMD gains the performance advantage, with AMD R9 Fury X being able to achieve average framerates of around 40 at even 4K Crazy settings. 

 

 

At standard settings and higher AMD’s R9 Fury X has a clear performance advantage over the GTX 980Ti at 4K, offering higher minimum and average framerates when using both the DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 APIs. 

Nvidia’s GTX 980Ti has decreased performance when using the DirectX 12 API at all settings in Ashes of the Singularity, whereas in pretty much all situations apart from the games lowest settings AMD has a performance increase. This performance increase for AMD seems to be down to Asynchronous Compute, which is a performance enhancing DirectX 12 feature that is unique to AMD GPUs right now. 

  

 

When looking at Ashes of the Singularity at 4K High settings it is pretty hard to think that the GTX 980Ti is similarly priced to the R9 Fury X, with the AMD GPU offering an 11FPS performance advantage to Nvidia when using DirectX 11, with an even larger performance gap at DirectX 12. 

In most games at 4K the AMD R9 Fury X and the GTX 980Ti are almost always neck and neck, but in Ashes of the Singularity AMD’s R9 Fury X is the easy victor. Oxide games have always stated that they are brand neutral and that they have not programmed the game to give either side an advantage, but we must remember that this developer was a former AMD Mantle developer and that this game has DirectX 12 features that are AMD exclusive at this time. 

  

 

At 4K high settings we see that both AMD’s R9 Fury X and Nvidia’s GTX 980Ti drop below 30FPS minimum framerates, though the Fury X does stay above that level of performance most of the time. 

Given how forgiving strategy games can be when it comes to average framerate (outside of the competitive scene), the game is pretty playable on AMD’s R9 Fury X at 4K extreme settings, whereas on Nvidia’s GTX 980Ti is is often below 30FPS when looking at battles, taking a lot away from the gameplay experience.  

  

 

At 4K crazy setting the game moves to become nigh unplayable on Nvidia’s GTX 980Ti but remains mostly playable on AMD’s R9 Fury X. In large battles both GPUs move to become jittery slideshows, but outside of battle the game is still pretty easy to control. 

Ashes of the singularity is best played with a high framerate, especially if you want to sit back and enjoy watching your units do battle without the game becoming a slideshow.